Let’s call a spade a spade… for the most part, country radio sucks.
They play the same 5 pop songs over and over again (literally, read our full country radio data analysis here), hardly any women, and with this new wave of boyfriend country bullshit, it’s enough to make you want to lay down in traffic.
And while most mainstream country doesn’t sounds like the country music that most of us grew up on, it’s exactly that: mainstream country.
If you know where to look, there’s a ton a great country artists out there that are still making the kind of music that many of their country music forefathers would’ve been proud to call country. Artists that are still carrying that outlaw spirit into the studio and onto the stage. Artists who made their reputations by doing things their own way, the right way.
The good news is that we did the hard work for you and created the ultimate introduction to some of today’s best traditional country music. Some of the artists are a little more mainstream, and some, maybe you’ve never heard of, but either way, there’s a little something for everybody, and definitely enough to get you started if this is your first venture out into the deeper waters of real country music.
We updated the playlist and we’re now looking at over 315 songs from some of country music’s finest “Modern-Day Outlaws.”